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Friday, July 18, 2014

Problem

The Game of Master Mind is played as follows:
The computer has four slots containing balls that are red (R), yellow
(Y), green (G) or blue (B). For example, the computer might have RGGB
(e.g., Slot #1 is red, Slots #2 and #3 are green, Slot #4 is blue).
You, the user, are trying to guess the solution You might, for example, guess YRGB.
When you guess the correct color for the correct slot, you get a “hit”
If you guess a color that exists but is in the wrong slot, you get a
“pseudo-hit”. For example, the guess YRGB has 2 hits and one pseudo hit.
For each guess, you are told the number of hits and pseudo-hits.
Write a method that, given a guess and a solution, returns the number of hits and pseudo-hits.

Solution

1st scan, we can find out how many hits there are by comparing character
by character. During this scan, we can also build a hashtable for all
the characters in the solution. The second scan, we count how many
characters in the guess are matched in the hashtable. The counts – hints
is the pseudo-hits.